Sprout Magazine

Dragon’s Dogma Vocation Tips: Ranger

Dragon’s Dogma was released in late May of 2012. It has been compared to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Shadow of the Colossus, Monster Hunter, and Devil May Cry. It is an action rpg that follows the a character whom you create using the pretty detailed Character Creation interface, and their quest to slay the Dragon. This will take you all across Gransys, with plenty of adventures and fun along the way.

The game is purely a single player experience. However, each player creates a “pawn” that will follow them throughout their adventures. They control this pawn’s development as well as its equipment and skills. This brings forth the only real online interaction within the game. A player is able to have three pawns in his party. To get to three, the player is able to recruit pawns that other people have made. These pawns aren’t taken away from the player who made them and the creator can receive items and rift crystals (which can be used to recruit higher level pawns) in return.

Each member of the party will have a vocation. This vocation determines that character’s stat growth, skill set, and weapons. For example, a mage will have low health, attack, and defense, though they will have high magic and magic defense. While they will be able to use magic, they will not be able to use, say daggers and a bow like a strider or a sword and shield like a fighter. There are nine vocations in total, though pawns can only become one of the first six. Each vocations plays extremely different from the others, and out of all the ones I’ve played, they’ve all been enjoyable (though the ranger and warrior are my favorites).

This article will teach you how to effectively use the Ranger, who is the most powerful vocation when at range. The Ranger has decent health growth, the highest stamina growth of any vocation, high attack growth, low defense growth, terrible magic defense growth, and average magic attack growth.

When using a ranger, you want to try and keep distance between you and whatever you’re fighting so that you can use your longbow to best effect. The longbow is most powerful from medium to long distances, not closer like the bows a strider uses. When opponents get close to you, use the daggers. They aren’t bad, and while the ranger doesn’t have as many skills with them as the strider, they have a few decent ones. I would recommend using hundred kisses. Because of their high stamina growth, rangers are also good at mounting larger enemies and slashing away with their daggers.

However, the daggers should still be considered your secondary weapon. The longbow is the Ranger’s true power. It allows the wielder to attack aerial enemies with astounding power as well as keeping out of harms way and dishing out a lot of damage. Skill wise, get Ten-fold flurry as quickly as you can. This is an incredible skill that doesn’t take too much stamina and allows you to do massive damage to anything you aim at. Gamble draw is a waste of time, it’s essentially a useless skill. Besides Ten-fold flurry, get whatever skills work best for you. Honestly Ten-fold flurry will be pretty much the only one you use.

The ranger is one of the best classes to pick, because it allows the player to attack anything, instead of relying on the idiotic pawns to attack enemies that are out of reach. So save yourself a massive headache and take up a bow.